Present-day display technologies such as liquid crystal displays, flexible displays, printable electronic displays, electronic paper displays, conformable displays, and wearable displays have become ubiquitous. However in all of these existing displays, the information displayed by individual pixels is not stored in the pixels themselves but instead sent to the pixels from an external source typically through wired interfaces. Such interfaces which are required to transmit information and address individual pixels can make displays fairly complex and the electrical power required to operate them can limit utility of these devices. There also exists a technological gap between processes used in conventional media such as painting or printing and those used to create electronic displays. In printing technologies for instance, once information is sent to the printer to be printed on paper, the dynamic aspect of the information is lost. Hence, printers are only capable of producing static images, with the exception of lenticular printing, where multiple patterns are printed on the same image and a change of the observation angle of the printed image alters the displayed pattern.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide a new approach for generating moving visual images where the information to be displayed is geometrically encoded in the pixels themselves and the pixels can be dispensed using a variety of techniques such as manual dispensation or nozzle based printing approaches amenable to both rigid and flexible substrates.